Explore the role of baseball in American life and culture today with the President of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Jeff Idelson, New York Times bestselling author, Kostya Kennedy, and ESPN Senior Writer, Steve Wulf.
Exploring Baseball Series also includes:
Jackie Robinson: Outsider Hero (May 8)
Dreamers and Doers: Kim Ng (June 11)
Writing Baseball (September 21)
Jeff Idelson, who has spent 28 years in baseball, is the president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, located in Cooperstown, New York. He is in his twentieth year with the Hall of Fame and sixth as president, having been named to the position in 2008, following previous roles in public relations, communications, and education. Before joining the Baseball Hall of Fame, Idelson spent 15 months as assistant vice president and senior press officer for World Cup USA 1994, the organizing committee charged with staging the 1994 soccer World Cup in America. He served as director of media relations and publicity for the New York Yankees from 1989-1993, after being hired as the club’s assistant director of media relations. He is a West Newton, MA native and a 1986 graduate of Connecticut College in New London, CT.
Kostya Kennedy has been an assistant managing editor at Sports Illustrated, covering a wide range of subjects and overseeing Sports Illustrated Presents, all special issues for SI/SI.com. He has been a staff writer at Newsday and written for The New York Times and The New Yorker. His television work includes appearing regularly as a contributor on MSNBC, as well as appearances on Late Night with Seth Meyers, Morning Joe, Imus in the Morning and repeat appearances on The Charlie Rose Show among others. He does frequent radio work, including on NPR, WFAN, ESPN, CBS and others. He earned an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, from which he received a Pulitzer Fellowship. He has taught in the graduate journalism programs at Columbia and at N.Y.U. Along with his award-winning New York Times bestseller, 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports, he is the author of the new, 2014 New York Times bestseller Pete Rose: An American Dilemma. He also edited Sports Illustrated’s bestselling The Hockey Book, and Swimsuit: 50 Years of Beautiful.
Steve Wulf is a Senior Writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. Before joining ESPN in 1997 as one of the founding editors of The Magazine, he wrote for Time, and before that, Sports Illustrated, and before that, the Fort Lauderdale News, and before that, the Evening Sun in Norwich, NY, which was right about the time Mike Epstein won the 1972 World Series with the Oakland A’s. He married Jane Bachman Wulf, the former SI softball pitcher, in 1984, and together they have raised four aces: Bo, John, Elizabeth and Eve.